Foreign money may have had a major impact on this presidential election. AFP Contributing Editor Michael Collins Piper reports that a secretive, well-funded Israeli propaganda unit has flooded the mailboxes of 28 million Americans—in key election battle-ground states—with anti-Muslim propaganda designed to promote Republican John McCain and defeat his Democratic challenger, Barack Hussein Obama II.

.A secretive, well-funded Israeli propaganda unit has flooded the mailboxes of 28 million Americans— in key election battleground states—with anti-Muslim propaganda designed to promote Republican John McCain and defeat his Democratic challenger, Barack Obama. The mysterious Clarion Fund is estimated to have spent as much as $50 million to produce and distribute a 60-minute DVD film entitled Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West through mass mailings and other endeavors. The producer of the film is an Israeli, Raphael Shute, a corporate officer of the Clarion Fund. Shute and two others who, until just recently, served as officers of the fund—Rabbi Henry Harris and Rebecca Kabat—are employed by an Israeli-based operation, Aish HaTorah International, that, according to the Washington Post, “focuses on national security issues in Israel.” Although federal election and tax laws prohibit nonprofit organizations (such as the Clarion Fund) from engaging in promoting political candidates, a Clarion Fund website implicitly endorsed McCain over Obama, saying, “McCain’s policies seek to confront radical Islamic extremism and terrorism and roll it back while Obama’s, although intending to do the same, could in fact make the situation facing theWest even worse.” Amazingly, the Obama campaign has refused to comment on the activities of the fund and its distribution of the film, probably because the support of pro- Israel voters is critical to Obama’s success, particularly in a number of key states where those voters historically have turned out in record numbers, effectively doubling their electoral impact.Even though the fund has removed the assertions favoring McCain from its website, the site still contains links to what the Washington Post described as “a vast network of sites that promote McCain.” Despite the fact that the Clarion Fund has clearly spent vast sums of money in this campaign, since the fund is a nonprofit group it is not required, by law, to disclose the names of its financial supporters. Clarion refuses to disclose those names. Those versed in political financing say that the estimated $50 million in expenditures by Clarion could well constitute one of the most expensive (and expansive) propaganda efforts ever carried out (in such a short amount of time, and particularly during an election season) by an “independent” group seeking to influence public policy and, ultimately, the course of an American election. The effort has clearly come right out of Israel and from the ranks of those operating on American soil who have a vested interest in inflaming Americans against the people of the Muslim world. In a related matter, a former high-ranking Pentagon official—who was a central player in a propaganda drive by the Israeli lobby to promote the theme that there are “Islamo fascist sympathizers” (meaning critics of Israeli influence on U.S. policy-making) embedded in the upper levels of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community—has been charged with defrauding the U.S. government of more than $300,000. The Navy Times reported on October 15 that Navy Commander Charles Coughlin is the target of a civil action by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, charging that the retired officer falsely claimed to have suffered severe injuries in the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon that made it impossible for him to perform simple tasks or to turn his head or raise his left arm above his shoulder. He claimed more than $300,000 in compensation from the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund. However, according to the Navy Times, “Coughlin kept playing basketball and lacrosse and ran the New York Marathon in under four hours two months after the attacks.” Prosecutors are moving to seize Coughlin’s $1 million home, a Mercedes-Benz and a minivan that Coughlin purchased with funds he procured through his deception.